All the optical illusions and bizarre forms of lightning you require.

Ball Lightning

Ball Lightning

They're unexplainable, unpredictable, and rare. Recorded sightings of these hovering, glowing spheres, which can range in size from a penny to several yards across, date back to ancient Greece, but scientists still don't know what causes them. Until recently many people didn't even think they were real.

The most plausible idea to explain ball lightning is vaporized silicon. In this hypothesis, a bolt of lightning strikes a spot of silica-rich soil, sending an orb of charged particles airborne. The inherent electricity causes the orb to glow.

In July 2012 researchers in China inadvertently captured video of this phenomenon, recording a 16-foot-wide ball of lightning on China's Qinghai Plateau. Their findings—released in January 2014—support the vaporized-silicon hypothesis, since there was silicon in the area's soil.

Brocken Spectre

Brocken Spectre

Unless you're a mountain climber, chances are you've never experienced a Brocken spectre. A Brocken spectre is your own shadow magnified and topped with a rainbowlike halo, and it occurs when you're standing with the sun to your back. The sun casts a shadow on water droplets in the distant air before you, reflecting back off the water droplets. This light then diffracts, or spreads, creating the shadow's rainbowlike halo.

The name refers to the Brocken, the highest peak in Germany's Harz Mountains, where conditions for this eerie optical illusion are ideal. This misty mountain peak pokes above cloud level, which means the sun is relatively low.